Holocaust
denial

The mass extermination of the Jews and other “undesirables” at the hands
of the Nazis during World War II is referred to as the Holocaust. It has
become a symbol of evil in our time. Like many symbols, the Holocaust has
become sacrosanct. To many people, both Jews and non-Jews, the Holocaust
symbolizes the horror of genocide against the Jews. Some modern anti-Semites
have found that attacking the Holocaust causes as much suffering to some
Jews as attacking Jews themselves. “Holocaust denial” refers to attacking
the accuracy of any aspect of the symbology or history of the Holocaust.

Holocaust denial seems to be the main motivation of the Institute for
Historical Review and its Journal of Historical Review. Since 1980
this journal has been publishing articles attacking the accuracy of various
claims about the Holocaust. There is clearly an agenda when a journal is
devoted almost exclusively to the single issue of making the Holocaust seem
like an exaggeration of biased historians. If truth and historical accuracy
were the only goals of this group, it would be praised rather than despised.
However, it seems that its promoters are more concerned with hatred than
with truth. Thus, even the inaccuracies that they correctly identify are met
with scorn and derision. For they never once deal with the central question
of the Holocaust. They deal with details and technical issues: Were there
six million or four million Jews who died or were killed? Could
this particular shower have been used as a gas chamber? Were these deaths
due to natural causes or not? Did Hitler issue a Final Solution order or
not? If so, where is it? These are legitimate historical issues. However,
the Holocaust deniers do not deal with the questions of racial laws that led
to the arrest and imprisonment of millions of Jews in several countries for
the “crime” of race. They do not concern themselves with the policy of
herding people like animals and transporting them to “camps” where millions
died of disease or malnutrition, or were murdered. They don’t address the
moral issues of medical experimentation on humans or of persecution of
homosexuals and the infirm. Why not? They don't address the Jewish victims who were slaughtered in mass shootings and buried in mass graves in more than 1,700 execution sites in the former Soviet Union.

Michael Shermer devotes two chapters of Why People Believe Weird
Things (1997) to the arguments of the Holocaust deniers. (In Denying
History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It?
[2000] Shermer and coauthor Alex Grobman devote nine chapters to the
subject.) Shermer takes up many of the deniers’ arguments and refutes them
one by one. For example, one of the favorite appeals of the Holocaust
deniers is to demand some proof that Hitler gave the order for the
extermination of the Jews (or the mentally retarded, mentally ill, and
physically handicapped). Holocaust deniers point to Himmler’s telephone
notes of November 30, 1941, as proof that there was to be no liquidation of
the Jews. The actual note says: “Jewish transport from Berlin. No
liquidation.” Whatever the note meant, it did not mean that Hitler did not
want the Jews liquidated. The transport in question, by the way, was
liquidated that evening. In any case, if Hitler ordered no liquidation of
the Berlin transport, then liquidation was going on and he knew about it.
Hitler’s intentions were made public in his earliest speeches. Even as his
regime was being destroyed, Hitler proclaimed: “Against the Jews I fought
open-eyed and in view of the whole world. . . . I made it plain that they,
this parasitic vermin in Europe, will be finally exterminated.” Hitler at
one time compared the Jews to the tuberculosis bacilli that had infected
Europe. It was not cruel to shoot them if they would not or could not work.
He said: “This is not cruel if one remembers that even innocent creatures of
nature, such as hares and deer when infected, have to be killed so that they
cannot damage others. Why should the beasts who wanted to bring Bolshevism
be spared more than these innocents?”

newThe Hidden Holocaust (60 Minutes) "The Holocaust is marked and memorialized at places like Auschwitz, Bergen Belsen, Dachau. But nearly half of the six million Jewish victims were executed in fields and forests and ravines, places that were not named and remain mostly unmarked today. They were slaughtered in mass shootings and buried in mass graves in the former Soviet Union, where until very recently, little had been done to find them....Thousands of eyewitnesses, millions of documents, and 15 years of investigating have led [French Catholic priest Father Patrick Desbois] to more than 1,700 execution sites."[/new]